NAME

perlamiga - Perl under Amiga OS

NOTE

Perl 5.8.0 cannot be built in AmigaOS. You can use either the
maintenance release Perl 5.6.1 or the development release Perl 5.7.2
in AmigaOS. See PERL 5.8.0 BROKEN IN AMIGAOS if you want to help
fixing this problem.

SYNOPSIS

One can read this document in the following formats:

manperlamiga

multiviewperlamiga.guide

to list some (not all may be available simultaneously), or it may
be read as is: either as README.amiga, or pod/perlamiga.pod.

A recent version of perl for the Amiga can be found at the Geek Gadgets
section of the Aminet:

http://www.aminet.net/~aminet/dev/gg

DESCRIPTION

Prerequisites for Compiling Perl on AmigaOS

Unix emulation for AmigaOS: ixemul.library

You need the Unix emulation for AmigaOS, whose most important part is
ixemul.library. For a minimum setup, get the latest versions
of the following packages from the Aminet archives
( http://www.aminet.net/~aminet/ ):

ixemul-bin

ixemul-env-bin

pdksh-bin

Note also that this is a minimum setup; you might want to add other
packages of ADE (the Amiga Developers Environment).

Version of Amiga OS

You need at the very least AmigaOS version 2.0. Recommended is version 3.1.

Starting Perl programs under AmigaOS

Start your Perl program foo with arguments arg1arg2arg3
the
same way as on any other platform, by

perlfooarg1arg2arg3

If you want to specify perl options -my_opts
to the perl itself (as
opposed to your program), use

perl -my_optsfooarg1arg2arg3

Alternately, you can try to get a replacement for the system's Execute
command that honors the #!/usr/bin/perl syntax in scripts and set the s-Bit
of your scripts. Then you can invoke your scripts like under UNIX with

fooarg1arg2arg3

(Note that having *nixish full path to perl /usr/bin/perl is not
necessary, perl would be enough, but having full path would make it
easier to use your script under *nix.)

Shortcomings of Perl under AmigaOS

Perl under AmigaOS lacks some features of perl under UNIX because of
deficiencies in the UNIX-emulation, most notably:

fork()

some features of the UNIX filesystem regarding link count and file dates

inplace operation (the -i switch) without backup file

umask() works, but the correct permissions are only set when the file is
finally close()d

INSTALLATION

Change to the installation directory (most probably ADE:), and
extract the binary distribution:

lha -mraxe x perl-$VERSION-bin.lha

or

tar xvzpf perl-$VERSION-bin.tgz

(Of course you need lha or tar and gunzip for this.)

For installation of the Unix emulation, read the appropriate docs.

Accessing documentation

Manpages for Perl on AmigaOS

If you have man
installed on your system, and you installed perl
manpages, use something like this:

manperlfunc

manless

manExtUtils.MakeMaker

to access documentation for different components of Perl. Start with

manperl

Note: You have to modify your man.conf file to search for manpages
in the /ade/lib/perl5/man/man3 directory, or the man pages for the
perl library will not be found.

Note that dot (.) is used as a package separator for documentation
for packages, and as usual, sometimes you need to give the section - 3
above - to avoid shadowing by the less(1) manpage.

Perl HTML Documentation on AmigaOS

If you have some WWW browser available, you can build HTML docs.
Cd to directory with .pod files, and do like this

cd /ade/lib/perl5/pod

pod2html

After this you can direct your browser the file perl.html in this
directory, and go ahead with reading docs.

Alternatively you may be able to get these docs prebuilt from CPAN
.

Perl GNU Info Files on AmigaOS

Users of Emacs
would appreciate it very much, especially with
CPerl
mode loaded. You need to get latest pod2info
from CPAN
,
or, alternately, prebuilt info pages.

Perl LaTeX Documentation on AmigaOS

Can be constructed using pod2latex
.

BUILDING PERL ON AMIGAOS

Here we discuss how to build Perl under AmigaOS.

Build Prerequisites for Perl on AmigaOS

You need to have the latest ixemul (Unix emulation for Amiga)
from Aminet.

Getting the Perl Source for AmigaOS

You can either get the latest perl-for-amiga source from Ninemoons
and extract it with:

tarxvzpfperl-$VERSION-src.tgz

or get the official source from CPAN:

http://www.cpan.org/src/5.0

Extract it like this

tarxvzpfperl-$VERSION.tar.gz

You will see a message about errors while extracting Configure. This
is normal and expected. (There is a conflict with a similarly-named file
configure, but it causes no harm.)

Testing Perl on AmigaOS

Installing the built Perl on AmigaOS

Run

makeinstall

PERL 5.8.0 BROKEN IN AMIGAOS

As told above, Perl 5.6.1 was still good in AmigaOS, as was 5.7.2.
After Perl 5.7.2 (change #11423, see the Changes file, and the file
pod/perlhack.pod for how to get the individual changes) Perl dropped
its internal support for vfork(), and that was very probably the step
that broke AmigaOS (since the ixemul library has only vfork).
The build finally fails when the ext/DynaLoader is being built, and
PERL ends up as "0" in the produced Makefile, trying to run "0" does
not quite work. Also, executing miniperl in backticks seems to
generate nothing: very probably related to the (v)fork problems.
Fixing the breakage requires someone quite familiar with the ixemul
library, and how one is supposed to run external commands in AmigaOS
without fork().